Pinch and others in the area are also among those shown to have accepted free trips, meals, and entertainment for taking part in lending institutions’ advisory boards — a practice now being critically compared with the way pharmaceutical companies have long sought to influence doctors to prescribe their products.

To attend one meeting this past year, as a member of Citizens Bank’s education-finance advisory board, Pinch took a mid-February trip to Walt Disney World, where Citizens Bank picked up the tab for everything from the flight to the Mickey’s Chocolate Fondue (what’s with the chocolate?!) delivered to his room at the Disney Yacht Club Resort.

Michele Kosboth of Lasell College in Newton was on the same trip. A year earlier she was wined and dined in Philadelphia — and taken to a Phillies game in a luxury box — on a similar jaunt, where she was joined by Michael Wildeman of Northeastern University and Michelle Smith of Emerson.

Emerson fired Pinch within a week after Kennedy released his report on June 14. But observers ask: if schools can really police themselves as they claim, why didn’t Emerson discover and stop Pinch’s dealings when the scandal erupted in March? That’s when New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo drew national headlines with allegations of kick-back schemes and other arrangements at dozens of schools nationwide.

According to David Rosen, Emerson’s vice-president of public affairs, Pinch failed to disclose his financial arrangement with CFS to Emerson officials, even when interviewed by school counsel after the national scandal broke.

But Rosen concedes that the college’s lapse was also partly attributable to its lack of a formal conflict-of-interest policy guiding its staff’s outside employment. Nor could Emerson’s staff look to higher-education associations and governing bodies for guidance. Both Emerson and professional groups are only now hastily compiling conflict-of-interest ethics guidelines.

Not long ago, higher-ed professional associations were less than enthused about such codes of conduct. The National Association of Student Financial-Aid Administrators (NASFAA) — whose president initially blasted Cuomo for his investigation — worked on guidelines several years ago, but its board refused to adopt them, says Eileen O’Leary, director of student aid and finance at Stonehill College in Easton. She was on the committee that worked on them.

“I am very sad that our association didn’t take the lead on this issue with a code of conduct years ago,” says O’Leary. Looking back at the reluctance of the board, she now says, “I’m wondering if they did not protest too much.”

Code-o-rama
Now, in the wake of the national scandal, the NASFAA is promising to clean up the very abuses it previously chose to ignore. So is, among others, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. “There are about a dozen [codes] under development,” says Rosen.

Many individual colleges across the country have quickly adopted guidelines, some working in regional groups, such as 11 Missouri colleges that voluntarily agreed to a code in April (with an attorney general’s investigation providing the impetus). Some lending institutions, including Nelnet, have even adopted their own codes.

Under pressure from state legislators, the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education has belatedly created a code of conduct for the state’s public colleges.

Unfinished business The sleazy backroom deal engineered by Congressman Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens to kill the proposed 130-turbine wind farm in Nantucket Sound would do more than scuttle visionary plans to build the nation’s first offshore wind farm.

Where is the hate? Once upon a time, no one whipped up conservative rage like Ted Kennedy.

Senate shuffle Don’t count Ted Kennedy out just yet, but the prognosis immediately set minds thinking about the inevitable departure of Kennedy from the US Senate, where he has served since 1962.

Strange bedfellows Wait, lemme get this straight: Was that Howie Carr — who's known for accompanying on-air references to homosexuality with a crude audio approximation of gay sex — happily schmoozing with guest Randy Price this past week?

The annunciations The broad brush strokes of Teddy Kennedy's presidential announcement may have uplifted liberal hearts, but Jerry Brown's announcement challenged liberal thinking with some pencil-sharp specifics about the role of government in economic planning for the 1980s.

Public and private affairs Philandering, like heavy drinking, traditionally has been one of those activities that the boys in the press keep mum about when reporting on the boys on the Hill, or the boy in the White House, or any boy, for that matter. The rationales for this silence are curiously contradictory.

Ted's turn A little-known provision in the crime bill now being negotiated by a House-Senate conference committee would greatly expand the number of prison cells available to house violent criminals, and it wouldn't be cost a dime. But it may be doomed unless Senator Ted Kennedy is willing to spend some political capital.

Going Mobil Washington – If ideology wasn't already dead in presidential politics, the plug was pulled on its support system last Monday, when the Kennedy campaign announced that its advertising and polling would be organized by Mobil Oil's vice-president of public affair, Herbert Schmertz.

Tormenting Teddy After 32 years in the US Senate, Ted Kennedy remains a force to be reckoned with, both for his legendary family history and his considerable accomplishments.

MRS. WARREN GOES TO WASHINGTON | March 21, 2013 Elizabeth Warren was the only senator on the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, aside from the chair and ranking minority, to show up at last Thursday's hearing on indexing the minimum wage to inflation.

MARCH MADNESS | March 12, 2013 It's no surprise that the coming weekend's Saint Patrick's Day celebrations have become politically charged, given the extraordinary convergence of electoral events visiting South Boston.

LABOR'S LOVE LOST | March 08, 2013 Steve Lynch is winning back much of the union support that left him in 2009.

AFTER MARKEY, GET SET, GO | February 20, 2013 It's a matter of political decorum: when an officeholder is running for higher office, you wait until the election has been won before publicly coveting the resulting vacancy.